At my local startup accelerator I find that AMZN has contacted many other devs in my area. I talked to the hiring manager, they are a nice bunch of folks working on a revolutionary problem but, alas, I am not moving to Seattle either.
At a big company different people have different experiences. Your manager and work group make a big difference.
I'm sure you can find somebody for whom working at Amazon is a living hell, and I am sure you can find somebody as happy as a clam.
As for the people I know there overall I have a positive impression but a lot of that comes from practicing vendor management (where it helps to have a PMA) An old Oracle DBA taught me the power of getting what you pay for from vendors thus I've invested a lot in getting good at getting service from AWS.
I will give them credit for at least being up-front about it. A coworker of mine was pretty far along in the process (had done a couple phone interviews, was arranging to fly cross-country to do an in-person) when the topic of work schedule came up. He has multiple kids and is in his 40s, so he was expecting a sane 40 hours a week. His Amazon contact let him know that either Amazon would be his life, or they weren't interested. That's much better than telling him it'd be 40 hours then punishing him if he ever didn't work 80.
